Average Follow-up Time Detail"...a mean follow-up period of 3 years." No standard deviation is provided."Among the 3,327 patients interviewed at baseline, 84.8% (n = 2,820) could be personally interviewed 1.5 years later and 73.9% (n = 2,460) 3 years later."

Exposure DetailInvestigators collected data on participants’ consumption of many types of alcoholic beverages. This entry pertains to beer consumption.

Abstinent vs.Drinkers

Also:abstinent1–9 g10–19 g20–29 g30–39 g40 or more grams

"To assess the current use of alcohol, participants were asked the following question: ‘At present, on how many days per week do you drink alcohol?’ (answer: never/1–2 days/3–4 days/5–6 days/7 days/I do not know). Those subjects who consumed alcohol were then asked ‘When you drink, how much alcohol do you drink on average?’ Frequency of alcohol consumption and quantity of beer, wine and liquor were determined. Data on alcohol intake were converted to a uniform measure of grams per day. Regardless of container size or alcohol type (i.e. beer, wine or spirits), one standard drink is any drink containing 10 g of alcohol. In this study, we distinguished between quantity of alcohol consumption (abstinent/1–9 g/10–19 g/20–29 g/30–39 g/40 or more grams) and type of alcohol (abstinent/wine (only)/beer (only)/mixed: wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages)."

Note: it is not clear how the final grams of alcohol categories were derived from the questions on the questionnaire.

Exposure distributions were only provided for certain categories of consumption:

"Information on current alcohol consumption was available for 3,180 subjects (Table 1): 50.0% were abstinent, 24.8% consumed less than 1 drink (10 g of alcohol) per day, 12.8% 10–19 g and 12.4% 20 or more grams. A small subgroup of 25 participants fulfilled the criteria of harmful drinking (>60 g of alcohol per day for men, respectively, >40 g for women). One man (>120 g of alcohol per day) and one woman (>80 g of alcohol per day) reported an extremely high consumption of alcohol."

Ethnicity DetailInvestigators do not provide data on ethnicity. The cohort is from Germany.

Age DetailAge details on the mean age and range of ages is are not provided by authors. All participants were age 75 years or older.1,698 (53%) were age 75-791,482 (47%) were age 80+

Screening and Diagnosis DetailScreening Method:

Other

AD Diagnosis:

DSM IIIR

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-Revised

DSM IV

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV

Other

Diagnostic assessment of dementia was based on the Structured Interview for Diagnosis of Dementia of Alzheimer type, Multi-infarct Dementia and Dementia of other Aetiology according to DSM-III-R, DSM-IVand ICD-10 [6].

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was diagnosed accordingto new consensus criteria proposed by the InternationalWorking Group on MCI [7–9].